BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Fibers and Spider Webs but No Answers in Boulder

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: March 1, 1999

PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN

By Lawrence Schiller

Illustrated. 621 pages.

HarperCollins Publishers. $26.

So after looking into the JonBenet Ramsey case for two years and conducting, with his researcher Charles Brennan, some 571 interviews with nearly 200 people, does Lawrence Schiller (''American Tragedy,'' about the O. J. Simpson case) have any idea who killed the 6-year-old daughter of John and Patsy Ramsey?

No. Like the rest of us he hasn't a clue.

Or rather, like the Boulder, Colo., police, he has 1,038 clues. And they point him to the conclusion that ''what I know now with hard-earned certainty is that since I was not present when JonBenet was killed, I have to question my right to offer an explanation, a best guess or a likely scenario of the events of Dec. 25-26, 1996.''

He continues: ''So, I find myself getting angry when I hear someone say, 'Patsy did it because . . .,' or 'John did it, you see . . .' Every time I hear yet another theory, I understand all over again why I wrote this book. I came to learn that I saw it as my job to find out as much as I could and therefore create the most accurate record available for others.''

Why then rush to print while the Boulder grand jury is still in session, with a book so riddled with misprints that even an errata slip correcting about a third of them includes an erratum?

Mr. Schiller did so for several reasons, presumably: to fill the vacuum created by the ending of the impeachment trial. To exploit the already intense public fascination with the case. To feed the reader fresh information about the murder. And to clarify why the case has created so much turmoil in Boulder, pitting the police against the District Attorney, and both against the press; laying waste certain prominent careers, and prompting suspicion that the wealthy Ramseys were being given privileged treatment.

All of which ''Perfect Murder, Perfect Town'' assuredly accomplishes. It reveals, for instance, that in the view of Linda Hoffmann-Pugh, the family's housekeeper, the white blanket found wrapped around JonBenet's body would have been available only to someone with detailed knowledge of the household.

And it tells you that the police have established that four fibers found attached to the duct tape sealing the mouth of JonBenet's corpse matched those on a red-and-black checkerboard-design jacket that Patsy Ramsey had been wearing both the night before and in the morning (although Mr. Schiller quickly adds that in the opinion of one forensics expert fibers are not unique like fingerprints and that they could have been transferred from the coat to the tape indirectly).

At the same time Mr. Schiller makes more understandable why the Ramseys were reluctant to cooperate with the investigation: he writes that the police, after failing to question John and Patsy formally during the first three days, then tried to bully them by withholding their child's body from burial. He places in a broader context the hostility between the Boulder Police Department and Alex Hunter, the Boulder County District Attorney: the police were institutionally trained to press for convictions while Mr. Hunter, attuned to Boulder's cultivated reputation as a peaceful place, preferred what amounted to a plea-bargaining route.

The book makes all too vivid how certain members of the press would stop at nothing to snatch scraps of gossip off the plates of officials trying to do their jobs: one reporter used a professed desire to find religion as an entree to people with information he could use.

Finally, the story leads you to see why two of the most prominent people to resign their jobs in protest over the way they perceived the case did so for opposite reasons: the police detective Steve Thomas because he felt the District Attorney was failing to go after the Ramseys aggressively enough, and Lou Smit, the District Attorney's investigator, because he felt the Ramseys were being persecuted.

As one of Mr. Schiller's witnesses points out, the case was such an overwhelming puzzle that no single theory would accommodate all the evidence.

Still, for all it accomplishes, the book is frustrating to read. Pieced together out of news articles, anecdotes, first-person recollections and passages of reporting, the narrative forms a pattern whose dots the reader is meant to connect. But doing so isn't always easy, because you sometimes don't know what a fragment means.

For instance, an early passage tells you that the broken window in the cellar had an intact spider web blocking it on the morning after the murder. Later several passages suggest that an intruder might have entered the window anyway.

Still later another passage goes into detail to show that web was a kind that was ''constantly reworked and added to by the spider,'' as opposed to one that is ''regularly replaced by the spiders and can be completed at any hour of the day, in less than 12 hours.'' From this you switch back to the position that an intruder couldn't have climbed through the window.

But in the closing pages of the book Mr. Schiller writes: ''The spider web on the window-well grate was not conclusive proof that nobody had entered through the window opening. The sudden rise in temperature the morning after the murder allowed for a spider to come out of hibernation and spin a new web, and some people argued that the web itself was elastic enough to survive disruption.''

Multiply this example many times, and you get a sense of the book's ambiguity. And then of course you never stop feeling oppressed by a sense that the mystery of who killed JonBenet is just not going to be solved, at least not within the space of ''Perfect Murder, Perfect Town.''

As one group of experts points out, even if you conceded that, in Mr. Schiller's words, ''the intruder theory, given the existing evidence, was untenable,'' prosecutors were left ''with the troubling question of which parent -- if indeed either parent -- had knowingly caused the child's death.''

He concludes, ''Until investigators could identify each parent's individual actions, two suspects meant no suspects.''

What heightens this sense of oppression is Mr. Schiller's correction of JonBenet's videotape image as a grotesque prodigy of sexuality. The beauty pageant stuff was a small part of her life, he explains. She was really a bright, sensitive child who was curious to know things like what a year was (''So I've been around the sun five times?''), and if ''roses know their thorns can hurt.''

Her murder and its aftermath, he argues in this somewhat pasted-together book, has diminished us all.